comeptitive nature
by Vertyshka
Summary: She anxiously shifted the flashlight from hand to hand, feeling her grip falter through fingers that sweat in the claustrophobic heat


It was something of a mystery how the bones had sunk in at just the right depth to be bothersome

**A/N: This was written because I loved the French setting in the T. Brennan novels. I wanted to bring some of that into this Brennan's world. Luc Clarance is an archeological fabrication of my own mind and Brennan still belongs to Kathy Reichs and the people who made Bones.**

**--**

It was something of a mystery how the bones had sunk in at just the right depth to be bothersome. They protruded lazily from a wall of adobe clay held in check by rows of decaying planks.

She noted how the ribs fell open lotuslike into a forest of twenty-four individual spires and surrounded a vulnerable spine. Silently, Temperance counted the cracks and hairline fissures as she mapped their ancient pattern into her mental library. These were her star charts, her mythical constellations.

She anxiously shifted the flashlight from hand to hand, feeling her grip falter through fingers that sweat in the claustrophobic heat.

A pelvis would tell the sex of the victim; she processed the information and tore her focus away from the artful cage.

"Female." The words drifted dreamily from tired lips, bastardized version of Spanish. At times, Temperance wished she were not so American. She wiped her mouth, automatically checking her hand for lipstick, although she knew better. Temperance wore no makeup on the trips into the mountains where the Peruvian weather made her neck damp and her mascara run.

"By the remains of her jewelry, she must have been Aclla." She gazed into the empty eye sockets, the slack jaw and the cracked skull peering out of the wall, and marveled a smile. "She must have been very beautiful."

"How can you tell, Doctor Brennan?"

Her guide had a thick voice. Like gravel ground into molasses coupled with a delightfully understated coastal accent. She found the way he said her name fascinating. Where the 'd's became 't's and the rolled 'r' flowed surreptitiously into existence, cutting off the soft 'n'. Every country had a different flavor of Spanish.

She had been about to answer, indeed tearing herself from the former woman to face her guide, but someone took her words before she could speak them. "Aclla's were young women of - extraordinary - beauty. Only fit to serve the priests. Is that right, 'Doctor Brennan'?"

-

Doctor Luc Clarance looked every bit the poor man's Indiana Jones, though it was not a connection Brennan would have made. To her, his rugged handsomeness and stylized fedora gave him the appearance of a child on Halloween wearing Grandfather's old mining jersey. She fought the urge to wince when he butchered the coastal dialect further, making her name sound French.

Diplomatically she smiled. "Yes, that's - correct." The words felt as forced as her expression when she stood. She wanted to call him a rapist.

-

Luc Clarance came from a modest French family in eastern Montreal. The oldest child of three, his mother indulged prehistoric fantasies of lost civilization until he was old enough to read them himself.

At twenty four, Luc Clarance completed an education in modern anthropology and archeology with the full support of his mother. His father thought rubbish of it but financed the boy's education out of love for his wife and hope his other two children wouldn't disappoint him. Later, authors would write exaggerated tales of a boy nurturing a dream against the wishes of his parents. Some years after that, a producer would ask for the rights to the major motion picture.

Luc Clarance, who apparently came from an impoverished home and an abusive father, would smile at the public and tell them it was by grace of God he was granted such a generous gift - and it was his sole dream to give back to the world.

Luc Clarance thought himself charming.

-

This is what Brennan thought: If archeologists were little boys that had never grown up, Luc was a five-year old with a massive ego and an unhealthy love of digging for fame. Haloed in the sunlight that spilled around him, Temperance could still see the eminence and glory written in the lines of his face.

When he smiled, there ought been a hallelujah chorus.

"Brennan. My darling friend." English now. Brennan could still recall the time he met Booth and her partner dubbed him 'too French to be liked.' "I almost didn't recognize you out of your lab coat. What brings you to my fabulous site? Surely your serial killers are not murdering the dead all over again!" Luc was the type of person that laughed at his own jokes.

Brennan found that almost as irritating as the way he said 'murder.'

_Myurdah_.

She squinted; it was against nonexistent dust, but gave the excuse to stop smiling. "I would appreciate if you moved. You're blocking the light."

It was not often Temperance Brennan abandoned a challenge so obvious. Not often did she bow her head in polite disrespect and tell him gently where he could shove his hack degree.

-

Men like Luc Clarance were not easily deterred.

Men like Luc Clarance - that smelled of dust and sweat and ego. Men like Luc Clarance - that though beautiful women were toys of the powerful.

Brennan suddenly felt the raw instinct to protect her find - protect this girl barely seventeen - trapped in clay for all eternity from the same breed of men that imprisoned her in chauvinistic slavery.

Luc smiled dispassionately and descended into the crude cave. "Brennan..."

She could feel the slurred 'r' at the back of his throat.

You could mistake his expression for friendly if it were not so predatory.

-

Cave air is dry and stagnant, raw with promise. The way it hung waiting between them as he approached, swirled when he ducked his head to protect the precarious balance of wood and rock. Finally it rested, stirring dust clouds around his heavy boots, settled in the space between.

There was a moment where it looked like Luc might reach out to her and the smugness in his eyes was replaced with a lost sense of hunger. Something about the forbidden wall surrounding the female anthropologist made his chest ache. He almost didn't notice when his hand reached for her shoulder. When she shifted her balance, he halted, noting the raising spines of warning. Her eyes flashed blue-green, a color he'd never been able to place but found irresistible.

And then he remembered; the broken wrist of two years ago, when they'd first met in a Montreal library and he'd made the mistake of touching her hand.

His arm fell dead at his side and Temperance shifted her weight back to the left.

-

It was a smart move; Brennan had no qualms about breaking another hand. His presence made her tense and the competitive distraction had concentration at a standstill.

When the world began moving again, she turned back to the remains in the clay. "What are you doing here, Dr. Clarance?" Somehow, she managed a calm tone, level and unwavering. She prided herself upon her own professionalism. Behind her, she felt Luc shift and the disturbance it caused in the cave air. Somehow her mouth felt dryer than it had five minutes ago.

"I heard there was a dig." He pronounced it _deeg_, and it felt like a lie "Being in South America, I thought it only natural for me to examine." Through the light cotton of her work clothes, he could see her muscles stiffen.

"A dig." She repeated the words bitterly. "Dig is something you do in a sandbox. I am fully qualified to examine and date these remains, Dr. Clarance. I do not need supervision!" She hadn't expected to feel as angry as she did, spinning to face him as strands of dark hair plastered wetly across her cheek. Luc felt the irresistible urge to push them away.

Before he could speak, Brennan was facing the skeleton embedded in the wall, her body making a protective shield. She spoke over her shoulder dismissively. "If your entourage wants to take over the site, fine. But these remains are coming with me to the Jeffersonian."

Without waiting for his response, she began the painstaking process of removing bones and bits of rocky clay from the wall. Carefully, she laid them by order of anatomy on a tarp her guide had provided. The older man, sensing a sort of danger in the electricity between the two, had vacated the cave, now speaking rapid Spanish to his co-workers on the surface.

-

When he began helping, Brennan wanted to protest. The thought of his hands on the thousand year old remains made her skin feel raw and unsightly, prickling gooseflesh in the summer heat. But he was blessedly silent and allowed the air to be filled with quiet, suspicious rustles of tools, rock and bone.

He was so close she could count his breathing, shallow and even. Fourty inhales, fourty exhales every minute; and Brennan wondered if he counted too.

-

Did his genius have a cost?

-

When he worked this close to her, so close he could reach out and hold her, he remembered and forgot all at the same time that his name was Luc Clarance and he was a posterboy for the archeological community. His hands sweat and the chisel slipped to tear polygon of clay from the wall. She admonished him; harshly.

He grinned in the usual way; the routine was familiar but the stakes had changed, as he'd dreamt of working at her side from the moment he met her and she'd broken his wrist.

-

Temperance was the first to hear the subtle cracking and settling. The groaning of wood warning its breaking point. She pulled his hands away too late to stop the damage as their world began to collapse.

Shoving him, she felt his fingers close on her own, the adrenaline racing moment of terror and disbelief masking the disgust of his calloused palm.

He pulled her close and threw himself through the opening, bracing them for the impact as all of Brennan's hard work collapsed in a wash of mountainous rock. Luc felt every bit the action hero, his heart beating savagely in his throat and all he could think of was the smell of her hair above the cloud of clay and dust. The softness inside the forbidden wall of emotion and the way his arms pressed tight into her abdomen.

It was a second before she rolled away, coughing and dirty but obsessively perfect. She seemed to look past him, through him. Her cracked lips moved slowly and she wiped at them, checking her hand for lipstick.

There was only dust.

-

_Are you trying to destroy me._

He wasn't, hadn't been.

_Do you have any idea how important that was._

He had. That's why -

_That's why you've come to take the glory._

Please, be reasonable, Brennan.

_I'll show you reason --_

-

The Peruvian medical system was not the most skilled, nor the most talented group of individuals, but Luc found they were more than capable of setting a broken wrist.


End file.
